The Book of Emotions

By João Almino

Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions "a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera." Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. João Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Release date: Feb 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781564788948

João Almino

Brazilian novelist, critic, and diplomat João Almino is the author of three volumes of essays and five of philosophy, in addition to the five novels of his Brasilia Quintet, of which Dalkey has published the last two, The Book of Emotions and Free City. He has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of Brasilia, and the University of Chicago. Among other awards, Almino won the 2003 Casa de las Américas Award for The Five Seasons of Love and the 2011 Prêmio Passo Fundo Zaffari and Bourbon de Literatura for Free City. In 2017, he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The Last Twist of the Knife is his seventh novel.

Book preview

June 6, 2022, after midnight

I had the habit of carrying a camera over my shoulder to record whatever crossed my path, like a writer taking notes, a forgetful historian who wanted to leave a statement, or a scientist making an inventory of the world. To photograph is to see with a trained eye, to crop and keep what one sees. Upon taking the picture, the photographs became engraved in my mind, like mirrors of what I once was. They are eternal instants, frozen in a personal museum.

I shall open this museum. It will be my legacy, though with this decision I’m not announcing that I’m about to die. Death hovers around old people like me, but it likes surprises. It came near many times without my knowing it at the time. Now, to keep it at bay, all I’d have to do is sell myself to science and then exchange my old organs for new ones. They say that I could even recover my eyesight. I stubbornly insist on remaining a natural being, like wormy organic apples that rot more easily. There are those who prefer them to apples treated with radiation to keep beautiful and shiny for weeks on end.

When I left Joana and Rio de Janeiro two decades ago, I kept a photographic diary for a little over a year. It’s the most personal thing in my files. But time has rid me of its sentimental, complaining style. Now, it evokes in me drier, more realistic interpretations. But I still remember it, page after page, because each one of them exhales feelings. Those photographs reveal themselves in rich detail in my memory, even more than if it were possible to see them. They’re like Stieglitz clouds; each one equals an emotion. My blindness reveals their essence, for in the end, to best see a photograph, you have to close your eyes.

The idea of using this diary as the basis for writing my book came to me while talking today to my goddaughter Carolina. She spent the entire morning here and brought me a version of Clarice Lispector’s stories on Brasília that I could listen to on my computer.

– Godfather, if you won the lottery, what would you do with the money? she asked me with the sweet voice that reminds me of her mother’s.

– Me? Nothing. If I could see, I would watch films and more films and I would start taking photographs again.

My blindness keeps me from seeing Carolina. But it’s as if I could see her. Her voice updates the face and body of the child I saw growing up. She would have the same dark, straight hair; the same clever, dark eyes; the same fair complexion.

– Don’t you want to organize your files?

When a girl of twenty poses such a question to an old man of seventy, she could easily word it as a threat, which Carolina didn’t do out of politeness, but even so, I heard: If there is anything of any value in this infinity of boxes and computer files, it would be better for you to sort it out before you die, otherwise, it’s destined for the trash. My files are now roughly sorted into landscapes, portraits, nudes, photos of former President Paulo Antonio Fernandes and of Vila Paulo Antonio, and other themes of lesser importance. Carolina is capable of digitizing whatever I need and of reordering my files on the computer. I was the one who created her interest in computers, as her mother once told me.

– Godfather, I have a friend who wants to be a photographer. She admires your work and she’s looking for an internship. It would be amazing if she could have access to your files.

I asked her to describe her friend.

– She’s dark . . . She sings. Plays the guitar . . . She’s twenty-five.

June 8, morning

In the midst of the dry season, there was a downpour, perhaps the last rain before the long drought.

I listened to Clarice’s story on the computer. In one passage, she defines the people of Brasília, the Brasiliarians:

Brasília is from a splendorous past that no longer exists. This kind of civilization disappeared millennia ago. In the fourth century B.C., it was inhabited by extremely tall, blond men and women who were neither Americans nor Swedes and who sparkled in the sun. They were all blind. . . The more beautiful the Brasiliarians were the more blind they were, the more pure and the more they shone, and the fewer children they had. The Brasiliarians lived about three hundred years.

I imagined that if I could live three hundred years and had not fathered a child, I would be the reincarnation of a Brasiliarian.

June 9

I mentioned to Mauricio my plan to make new use of the photographic diary.

– Why don’t you record your comments about the photographs? Then we can get someone to compile them into a book.

– I want to reflect, to develop my ideas.

– That’ll only get in the way. Get right to the point. Say what you want and show the photos. No one has time to think.

Mauricio told me that his whole right arm is tattooed. He had me touch the two studs in his ears and the gold ring in his nose. He has become a tall, corpulent man, even taller than I am. He reminds me of who I once was in my youth, and not just because of the studs, but mainly because of the unfinished years of education, changing from one major to another. And the love I have for photography he has for music, but not classical music, which is Carolina’s passion. He’s heir to the old Brasília rockers and composes in a beat called rockonfusion.

June 10

I’m not going to follow Mauricio’s advice. I won’t ask anyone to write for me. If Homer, blind like me, was able to compose the Iliad and the Odyssey, why wouldn’t I be capable of writing my own personal little odyssey? I enjoy hearing the phonemes of each letter and this computer’s calming voice, which I can modulate according to my mood by using this program for the blind. If necessary, I can also listen to my texts on the talking camera. I’ll only need assistance selecting and reordering the photographs in my old diary, the photographic diary. Aside from that, I still find it complicated to reorder my texts relying only on my hearing. No matter. I’ll make a minimum of revisions and keep the paragraphs in the order that they come to mind.

Saint John’s Night, 2 o’clock in the morning

Both in the book I intend to write and in this new diary, I’ll comment on whatever comes to mind, in the order it comes to mind. For example, just now—and out of order—my dog Marcela came to mind. There are days when she is the only one around me, that is, if I don’t count the delivery man who brings meals to me. She’s a patient, honey-colored Labrador who lives with me on the third floor of a building at 213 North. She guides me from one place to another, and when she isn’t guiding me, she stays at my feet. She barks at other dogs passing by, and today, she barks at fireworks, the sound of children, the Northeastern music, and the Saint John’s Day square dancing. The dancing is lively; I’ve been listening to the sounds of the triangle and the accordion, visualizing the colorful flags fluttering in the wind, and I’m unable to sleep.

June 26

It wasn’t hard learning to live alone. I fill the time between the visit of one friend and another with my writing. Since friends are few and almost never visit, I have plenty of time to fill. Aside from those who left Brasília, I have already lost the friends from my generation. My friends’ children and a few friendships made in recent years are all that remain. To strip truth to its essence, the only one who remains, besides Mauricio, is my goddaughter Carolina.

I thought about beginning the book with portraits of them. But that would invert the order of the story. Mauricio and Carolina should not take precedence over their parents. Or more precisely, over their mothers.

Still June 26, 10 PM

Reflecting on what I wrote above, I should confess that on one point I wasn’t quite truthful. Being alone is not always easy. To be exact, there are days in which I transport myself to that tree in the film Amarcord and there, perched on the highest branch, shout over and over: "Voglio una donna! Voglio una donna! Voglio una donnaaa!" Sometimes I see myself as Tiresias, punished with blindness for having seen Athena naked. I saw her nude and not just once, but several times, until she finally decided to cover my eyes with her hands. The goddess was unable to restore my sight, but in exchange she gave me the ability to use writing as the means to ground memory. I know that this gift should be enough for me, since the old must live only from their memories. But a friendly smile, a tender hand, a voice that reads me a page of a good book, and a companion for a stroll around City Park or the nearby Water Hole Park would give a nobler meaning to my existence.

Besides, vicarious love fills some of love’s emptiness in me. I do what I can for Mauricio and Carolina to end up together. They’re obviously fond of each other. With a little push, which I won’t fail to give, they’ll fall into each others’ arms.

June 27

The book I intend to write, based on my old photographic diary, could be considered a scrapbook of my incomplete, sentimental memories from a period in which I could see, and saw too much. I will call it The Book of Emotions. Life is not measured in minutes, and memories are not written to enumerate everything that happens in a chronological order, as if measured by the hands of a watch. As a matter of fact, I wear a watch without hands. Like the buttons on a radio that skip right to the stations with the best reception, my memory jumps to things that can still make my heart beat. Parodying the poet, I blindly penetrate into the realm of images.

June 28

Today, Mauricio helped me select five of the photographs to guide me through the beginning of the book. It’s not worth using all of the photos from the old diary, and I’m thinking of adding some that aren’t there. The basis for my selection will be the emotion I felt when I took the photograph, was photographed, or looked at a photograph.

June 28, after the 8 PM soap opera

The idea for The Book of Emotions is that the person speaking will not be me but rather another Cadu, someone twenty years younger who can see and who composes a photographic diary. It’s a way of discarding my cane and my slow, tired manner of walking. He sits down beside me and begins to speak to me. He carries a box full of photographs that he begins to show me, one by one.

June 29

Now that the first photos have been chosen, all I need is the desire to begin writing.

[June 29]

1. Geometry of doubt

When Joana and I discovered that we couldn’t have children, we didn’t undergo the tests to determine whose problem it was. That impossibility was a blessing: we didn’t want to have children. However, it was unlikely the infertility was mine because many years before in Brasília another woman had conceived my child.

We tried living only for pleasure and disengaging ourselves from day-to-day obligations, problems, and cares. We believed we could avoid jealousies and recriminations, as well as the duty of fidelity, the other side of adultery. I had the romantic illusion that living in separate quarters from Joana would make us feel like eternal sweethearts, single and childless. Separated by only a few floors, it’s true. After my first wife’s suicide, and ever since Joana had divorced, we’d decided to live in the same building in Flamengo.

She was the owner of both apartments. She’d inherited a publicity company from her father, managed by one of her brothers. She could live off the income if she wanted. But once in a while she wanted to prove her usefulness and pose as an entrepreneur helping her brother. And her passion for fashion had led her to open a store and create the Joana Rodrigues line.

It was February, 2001, and I was in my fifties. With age, who doesn’t tend toward the ridiculous? Each person contributes his own dose of stupidity to the stupidity of the world. Millions of men on a night like that one, in that same city of Rio de Janeiro, looked at the woman beside them and asked themselves if she still felt the same desire for him. If she still loved him. If she was interested in someone else. But not all of them ran the risk, as I did, of falling from the ninth floor, to take photograph # 1 (see above). It’s a photograph of the façade of a building from the 1950s taken from above looking down. The photograph is geometric in its composition, defined by the edges of the illuminated windows on several floors and by the arrangement of people at the entrance. From the distance of nine floors, several small heads can be seen, arranged as if on a chessboard, each facing in the same direction. The pavement shines in the background, reflecting the streetlight. One person, exactly in the center, looks up. It’s a middle-aged man, balding with light-colored hair. A driver holds the door of the luxury car open behind him.

I have hundreds of similar photographs, but that is the only one from a strange angle, in which the entire building façade, from my floor to the ground, appears. I was so interested in what was going on down below that I leaned out the window with the camera to take the photograph. I had purchased a refracting lens that let me take pictures, without being noticed, of things off to the sides. I had used that lens to photograph spontaneous expressions of people on the street, at bus stops, at subway exits, in Cinelândia and even at an entrance to the Rocinha slum. Now I’d decided to focus the camera for an entire week at the window with the lens turned down, and through the viewfinder I spotted men entering the building with suspicious looks on their faces—for example, a hopeful smile. I ignored the ugly, the old, and the paunchy ones. Joana wouldn’t be interested in those. I had forgotten the category of the ugly rich, the very rich, until on that night I recognized the far-off tiny face of Eduardo Kaufman looking in the direction of my camera, as though he were only a detail to fill that photograph.

It’s not a photograph to be appreciated for its aesthetic qualities or for the information it communicates. Looking at it, I’m like a poet who cries when reading his pathetic love poem and feels the very body of his loved one’s pulse in the verses, although he’s aware that the very same poem may appear dull to other readers. Or else like the author of an autobiographical novel who, after exposing so much about himself and writing with so much emotion, knows that his emotion doesn’t move those annoyed by a story with no plot. As a matter of fact, the impartial observer notices neither the courage nor the despair present in that photograph. Each picture is different depending on who’s looking at it. After I snapped the shutter I waited twenty minutes and went up to Joana’s apartment.

[June 29, night]

2. The man who saw too much

I filled my lungs, preparing to fire words like bullets at Joana and Eduardo, but I was prevented by my own timidity. Instead, I filled the silence with imaginary conversations between the two of them. With their conversations about me. This time Eduardo didn’t brag about politics and business. He proposed marriage to Joana. She accepted when presented with the diamond ring he pulled from the inside pocket of his jacket. He took her to São Paulo. And there, Joana came increasingly to admire Eduardo’s qualities, refined by money. She planned to have a fertility treatment and then children, lamenting the years lost at the side of a vulgar, immature man like me.

– Eduardo just asked about you, Joana said, with the same husky voice that always charmed me.

I barely heard what Eduardo was saying. I noticed only the arrogance of someone who believes himself king of the world and of Joana.

– I want to make you a proposal, he said. To send you to Brasília, all expenses paid. I need a photographer for a project about Paulo Antonio.

When still young, more than thirty years before, I had lived in Brasília with the sister of the then President Paulo Antonio Fernandes and had many of the photographs on the front page of the Correio Braziliense.

Eduardo wanted to get me as far away from Joana as possible. I’d never agree to that, nor would I ever leave her apartment before Eduardo himself left. I had always picked fights with him. If necessary, I’d smash his face in.

– Your material is quite valuable; you just don’t realize it. No other photographer had as much access to Paulo Antonio’s private life.

Unlike today, my problem was seeing too much. I saw everything going on around me down to the smallest details. The visible was real and the real was visible. To know and to see were the same thing. What I couldn’t see probably didn’t exist. At that moment I saw, but it would have been better not to have seen. Not to have seen Joana, not to have seen Eduardo Kaufman. I looked away, but Joana’s bare shoulders danced to the movement of Eduardo’s hands. I captured that dance with my camera through the reflection in the window. Photo # 2 (above) doesn’t allow me to lie: I was present, watching that dance. It provided me with the evidence I needed. It was like the proof of a crime. Afterward it reminded me how Joana had grown even more seductive with age. We see her thin profile, the perfection of her nose and the volume of her breasts. Her hair, long and blonde when I met her, was short and had regained its natural color, a light chestnut, adding gravity to her aquiline gaze. Photography is neither a part of a film nor a moment in a sequence of facts. It’s a time for reflection, observation, and discovery. Looking at a photograph, it’s possible to close one’s eyes, not to stop seeing, but rather to see more. That’s why it’s not surprising that although I’m blind I can still see the photograph of Joana and Eduardo Kaufman—and see it better—with its reflections and superimposed planes that also make it the photograph of a nightmare.

June 29,